Water P-Notes
51 items available
Permanent URI for this collection
These practitioner notes (P-Notes) are published by the Water Sector Board of the Sustainable Development Network of the World Bank Group. P-Notes are a synopsis of larger World Bank documents in the water sector.
Items in this collection
1 - 4 of 4
-
Publication
Template for Assessing the Governance of Public Water Supply and Sanitation Service Providers : A Tool for Understanding Water System Effectiveness
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-04)The template is a tool to assess the performance of an urban water supply and sanitation (WSS) service provide by taking into account the governance, policy, and management context it operates in. The template complements extensive work done on comprehensive performance indicators through the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities (IB-NET). These metric indicators measure service coverage, efficiency, reliability, financial sustainability, environmental sustainability, and affordability to provide reliable data about the quality of WSS service and the performance of WSS service providers. -
Publication
Key Topics in Public Water Utility Reform
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-01)Urban water supply services have traditionally been provided by state-owned, water utilities. In the past decades, many governments have tried to turn state-owned water utilities into effective and viable organizations with mixed success. Why have some public utilities become more efficient service providers, while others have not been able to break the vicious cycle of low performance and low cost recovery? The World Bank report "key topics in public water utility reform" presents a framework of attributes of well functioning utilities and how they have introduced key institutional measures. It thus aims to help water and sanitation sector practitioners to choose and apply public utility reform approaches. -
Publication
Consumer Cooperatives for Delivery of Urban Water and Sanitation Services
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)To find the optimal delivery model for urban water supply and sanitation (WSS) services, one must look beyond ownership structures to the practices and designs that support good performance. Consumer cooperatives are often attractive institutional models. This note focuses on a Bolivian cooperative that is one of the most successful water cooperatives in Latin America. Successful cooperatives focus on building internal technical and managerial capacity. Most are leaders in technical and organizational innovation. They monitor operations, standardize processes where possible, engage in business planning, and clearly define responsibilities. Management uses benchmarking to assess performance gaps. Outsourcing is normally low, because the incentive of secure employment is stronger than the potential savings to be had from outsourcing. However, because cooperatives are not bound by public procurement procedures, contracting can be done quickly when needed. -
Publication
India's Water Economy : Bracing for a Turbulent Future
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)For 150 years India has made major investments in large-scale water infrastructure, bringing water to areas that previously lacked it. The results have been spectacular, both nationally, through the production of food grains and electricity, and regionally, as projects have generated direct and indirect economic benefits. Once-arid areas have become centers of economic growth, while historically well-watered areas have seen slower progress. The poor have benefited greatly from such investments. Poverty in irrigated districts is one-third that in unirrigated districts. India needs more water-storage capacity, appropriately scaled. The present system is capable of storing only 30 days of rainfall, compared with some 900 days in the major river basins of arid areas of developed countries. And the need for storage will grow, as global climate change begins to be felt: rapid glacial melting is likely to occur in the western Himalayas in coming decades, accompanied by greater variability of rainfall in large parts of the subcontinent. But India's water management system is not sustainable. Without significant increases in investment and profound changes in the way India's water institutions are run, the country will face water shortages and environmental problems that will gravely affect its people and its economy.